He and Jamie knew the place was starving already, with ale a sight cheaper than bread, yet those Scottish nobiles bound to King Edward were clearly mustering — and food was arriving, grain and meat and ale, in carts guarded by English wearing the badge of Aymer de Valence, Earl of Pembroke.
The presence of his own mesnie meant the Earl was here, but with just enough numbers to garrison the castle and keep all the food and drink safe. Not for the town, nor even for the garrison, nor the Scots lords, but for others — supplies, stockpiling here for the bulk of the army because the fortresses they usually relied on for invasion were all gone. That meant the English were due here in force soon — but where were they now?
Dog Boy had heard that labour on the Berwick town-wall defences had stopped because the workers were too weak and he saw for himself the ditch and rampart, half-finished and no more than a dyke. You could take the town, he thought to himself, with a jester’s bladder on a stick — though the castle was still formidable.
He had heard, too, that Isabel MacDuff was the sight to see, dangling from the Hog’s Tower in her cage, but in the time it took to battle for a leather jack of warm ale at Tavish’s Tavern, Dog Boy learned that her charms had been overcome by a new entertainment.
They were burning a witch under the walls of the castle.
The mob gathered in the moody dim of a day gone to haar off the sea, expectant and lusting with the desperation of those who need bread but will take blood if it is offered.
Dog Boy filtered along with them, the Napiers and Harpers and Butlers from Edinburgh and the Lothian March roistering alongside the sullen MacDougalls and McNabs from beyond the Mounth, who patently wished they were not here at all, in a soft southern place where no one spoke the True Tongue.
Dog Boy was elbowed and shouldered, growling so that folk knew he was no easy mark, with his dagger and old sword, an axe and a rimmed iron hat dangling from his belt. He searched the battlements, squinting in the growing fog and premature pewter dim and not expecting to see her at all, having heard she could only be viewed if you stood in the bailey, which was a step too far for him. Surprise stiffened him, then, when he saw her.
Cage-freed, she stood high on the battlemented wall beside Malise — grey-haired now that one, Dog Boy saw — with a loop of cloak over her own head, which still seemed fox-russet bright. They stood like lord and lady above the crowds and anyone who did not know the truth would have been fooled by it.
Dog Boy dragged at her with his eyes, willing her to look — and then she did. He was sure of it, saw the jerk in her like a hooked fish, was certain she had seen and recognized him — but the arrival of the witch threw up a surge and a roaring bellow that snapped the lock between them.
The woman moved in the midst of a coterie of censer-swinging priests and an intoning canonical. She stumbled forward draped in a clinging shift and a hagging terror between spear-armed, grim-faced guards lent by the castle; her face was a cliff, grey with the numb of fear.
Dog Boy knew her. Knew her and her accuser, the wee pinch-faced man who walked with his chin triumphant and defiant, basking in having caused all this. Frixco de Fiennes looked right and left and never behind at the woman he had condemned. Dog Boy wondered dully where Aggie’s bairn was.
It was easy to read the truth between the long, rambling pronouncement, half-drowned in the shrieks and howls of the baying mob. Frixco had declared Aggie the traitor who had let the Scots into Roxburgh, using foul Satanic spells to hide them from view. The fact that the Church was promoting the woman’s death and not the seneschal of Berwick showed that the Common Law considered the evidence flimsy at best. The Church needed no other evidence than the woman’s confession and her bloody fingers and bruised face showed how that had been achieved.
Now she was a witch. Not a woman, for each inquiring priest would have to look himself in the mirror glass of his soul after what had been done to a woman, but you shall not suffer a witch to live so the broken, split-lipped, weeping ruin they fixed to the stake was a witch, spawn of Satan and not any human thing at all.
Fastened with chains, Dog Boy noted dully, since ropes would burn through and roll her messily to the feet of her accusers and the gaping, howling mob. If Christ Himself walked among them, they would deceive Him, he thought.
The priests smeared her soles and jellied legs with pitch, daubed it on the shift and made it cling more provocatively; a red-faced soldier, all drink-broken veins and bad teeth, clutched his groin and bellowed out that this was her last chance for a decent fuck outside of Hell.
‘Ye brosy-faced hoorslip,’ Dog Boy growled and elbowed him hard enough to double the man over, gasping and boaking cheap ale over all the shoes nearest him.
Nivver violet a lady. Never was a lady more violated than Aggie, finding the harsh truth of what lay beyond the confines of Roxburgh. Not adventure and freedom, but turning slowly to a shrieking horror of black, with a sweet stink so like pork as to make you retch at the saliva it brought to starving mouths. The priests solemn and canting, invited the last blister of Aggie to repent her sins; it was, Dog Boy realized with a sour curl to the lip of him, an Ember Day.
Through the haze of smoke and witch-hair tendrils of haar, Dog Boy found Isabel’s eyes again — or thought he did — before he turned away and slouched through the crowd, heading back down to Scotch Gate and the bridge, hunched and moody and careless.
Frixco de Fiennes was more than a little drunk, on wine and fame both. He had watched his brother die of the festering wound he had taken at Roxburgh and discovered that, without him, he was that worst of creatures, a noble so low and Gascon he might just as well have been dung.
He had taken work — welcome to a man with scarce two coins to rub against each other — with the harassed officials still trying to carry out King Edward’s writs in a land where he had no power. It had taught him, in short order, that the years of juggling accounts in Roxburgh had honed a talent for tallying, where a merk was two thirds of a pound, a shilling of twelve silver pennies one-twentieth of a pound and the penny the only actual coin in all of it.
It had taught him, too, that there was a new-fangled way of tallying, using some foul heathen Moorish numbering system which made it all easier, according to the young, thrusting clerks who promoted it. Frixco saw the tallying up for his own talents and the bleak future of it soured him.
It was Aggie’s misfortune to stumble on him at that moment, pleading for help for ‘his bairn’. Turning her in had been desperation — but it had also netted him a reward, which he had spent on clothes and wine. Now he was staggering from the burning stink and wondering where he could make more such coin.
He collided with the man, the pair of them as much at fault as the other. Frixco, alarmed at having annoyed one of the hundreds of rough, armed men slouching and reeling about the streets, stammered out an apology — and then saw the face.
He blinked, puzzled, for he knew the face but could not place it … the knowledge crashed on him like the apple in Eden flung at his forehead; he saw the black, dagged hair and the bearded face, saw it as he had at Roxburgh, the scowl arched over a fistful of steel.
Dog Boy and Frixco stared at one another for a long moment and Dog Boy knew he had been recognized, knew it was all up with him in Berwick and felt a sudden, savage exultation.
‘Nivver violet a lady,’ he growled and slammed a horny-handed fist into Frixco’s face, wishing he had a dagger in it. He leaped over the mud-spattered sprawl of the man and was off down the street like a new lamb. He ran no more than a few paces, fell into a swift walk and filtered on down through the throng lurching away from the remains of the pyre.